26 February 2026. Bankers and Banking in historical capitalism: some early notes with Hannah Forsyth

26 February 2026, 2pm-3pm

In-person at Melbourne Law School

Register here.

Sometime between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries banking moved from a marginal service industry on the edge of international shipping to a central pillar of the modern state. By the late twentieth century, unelected bankers were now handed the key responsibility for managing domestic economies, while for ordinary people banks were a necessary mediator of everyday financial activity. Within the first decade of the twenty-first century, bankers were tasked with protecting a global finance sector that became ‘too big to fail’. Their greatest anxiety, however, was not the self-harm performed by the finance sector’s deep dive into sub-prime, toxic debt but democracy’s tendency to redistribute wealth. (Well, supposedly. If only democracy actually did that.) This week, when Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, stands boldly against the tyrannical nut job currently leading the United States, letting bankers run the world unimpeded seems like a less bad idea than it did during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) or even, in their toddler stage, during the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that followed.

For the most part, the story of banks is told by economists and economic historians as an arcane industry rather than a central pillar of late capitalism, liberal democracy and everyday life deserving of critical, historicised attention. This new history of bankers and banking in historical capitalism from the Gold Rush to the GFC (or possibly to Cryptocurrency) seeks to critically demystify this central - and yet oddly invisible - component of the history of capitalism.

In this paper I will articulate my goals in pursuing this project and describe some early entry points. These starting places include:

-    A history of gold rush banking, from the sale and transport of gold on Australian (and possibly Californian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African) goldfields to the vault of the Bank of England following the 1844 Bank Charter Act

-    A labour history of bankers from the bottom up, focusing on the formation of the United Bank Officers’ Association in Sydney in 1919

-    An account of the Australian 1937 Royal Commission into banking, with a special focus on the bank surveys submitted to the RC, but also Chifley’s dissenting report of the Commission

-    A reconsideration of Australian women’s relationship with banks since 1970s-90s deregulation and the rise of credit (and debt) as the foundation of economic activity after the end of the Bretton Woods economic order

In the paper I will compare this ‘entry point’ approach to the history of bankers to the sweeping statistical and archival study I completed in my history of professions (published as Virtue Capitalists in 2023) and seek advice and input as I begin.

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Hannah Forsyth is a historian of work, education and capitalism based in the Blue Mountains. She is Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of New England and author of Virtue Capitalists: the rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world 1870-2008 (Cambridge University Press 2023) and A History of the Modern Australian University (NewSouth 2014). Hannah writes regularly for the public sphere and is best known for her substack, F*cking Capitalism at https://hannahforsyth.substack.com/